by Fiona Kidman
Ming didn’t say goodbye to him when she died. Take me to the window, she had said to Hugo, on the day of her death. Let me look out on the lake. That was where she had sat, while the other boys, who had been called, sat with her and watched the light going down on a winter’s afternoon. John had stayed late at school on library duty that day, and she hadn’t waited. That was unfair, he believed, a sign that she had less regard for him than his brothers.
When he thought about who would mourn him, it occurred to him that Violet would, more than anyone. Jessie would be relieved, glad that she had gone when she did. He closed his eyes and thought about the homely girl with the lovely creamy neck whose body he pressed to his, and thought it was better like this. What was between them was all a lie, even though he liked her enormously, and wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her for the world. But she would have gone anyway; she was ready to leave that night and what could he possibly have offered her that would have brought her back? He didn’t understand why Violet had tried to set up their partnership, like an arrangement, or a marriage in the offing. As if she wanted to hold him there, keep her eye on him with someone safe. Well, it didn’t matter now. All that was past.
The water round him seemed to be turning warm and turquoise, as if he had been overtaken by the silky sinuous blueness of the best days of his childhood by the lake. He held one of his hands up above his face; in the moonlight, it was a cold curled claw that he could no longer feel. Then it seemed impossible to think about anything any more except that he hoped they would find him all in one piece, that his fingers wouldn’t have floated away, that the giant eels said to congregate at the river’s mouth wouldn’t make short work of him.
THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL
Lou had been in the forest for three days. Sometimes he whistled to himself; at other times he whittled pieces of wood and bark with an ivory-handled pocket-knife that his father, the lawyer, had given him for his twelfth birthday. Each gift he bestowed was presented with a ceremonial clearing of the throat, a small speech about the responsibilities of accepting the present, and of getting older.
Lou’s first attempt at killing himself had failed. He had taken a piece of garden hose with him as he left home. When he’d come to the clearing in the forest, he tried it out, attaching the hose to the exhaust and leading it inside the car. Then he drank a bottle of whisky, in order to stupefy himself. He would just drift away into unconsciousness. All very painless. Nobody would think to look for him here at the end of this almost abandoned track, familiar only to him. Months might pass, years even. And still he would be in this secret place. Above him stretched a canopy of beech trees, their light leafy crowns almost meeting overhead. At the edges of the clearing was a stand of mingi-mingi and tightly gathered ferns. A tree fall, perhaps the result of wind throw, or of age, marked off the boundary on the south side. Lou sat on this fallen tree and contemplated the uselessness of that failed first attempt, the comic ineptness of it. The hose had been full of holes. He could hear Freda telling him that if only he had paid more attention to things around the home, he would have discovered this.
It took a day for him to wake up and find out what had caused the problem. He used his pocket-knife to trim the hose back, hoping to get rid of the offending gaps, but then it was too short. Besides he’d run out of petrol while the engine purred away on his fruitless bid. He had calculated the bare minimum of fuel needed to bring him here, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to drive off. He wouldn’t be going anywhere.
He could always hang himself. But if he failed? If he did a bad job at that too? Slow death, the full punishment. He was appalled that he was so afraid, but ashamed that perhaps he didn’t want to die as much as he should.
Because, really, there was nothing to live for. LAKE CLAIMS LIVES — YOUNG PEOPLE DROWN. The headlines ran in a never-ending ribbon in front of him. The quarrel with his family. His boat. His girlfriends, their lives in tatters. Children, a voice in his head reminded him, a voice that again sounded remarkably like Freda’s. They were not children, he found himself arguing. They were over the age of consent.
They were children when you met them. Her relentless voice had followed him, transporting him back in to some place in time, when girls with gap-toothed smiles, wearing frilly dresses with flat-chested bodices gathered at his house and sang ‘Happy Birthday’, and clapped for Evelyn, the child willed on to him.
But Belle wasn’t a child. Belle had never been to the parties, never left his house bound for a school dance, as Marianne had done. Belle had come to him fully formed, an adult with a history as mysterious and ugly as his own. He was her first choice, the first man she had picked on her own. What would they have done to her by now?
‘I looked at you and God brought me a vision of evil,’ Wallace said, the night of the fight. As others were fleeing, Wallace had appeared in the restaurant, soft-soled and fat-faced with a look of satisfaction, so that Lou knew he had been watched and followed.
The forest floor was littered with leaves and the raw spoils of partly formed humus, and carpets of mosses and liverworts, making every footfall soundless. He studied the leaves for what seemed like the thousandth time, their serrated edges and various colours, brown, darkly red, some transparent except for their skeletal veins, gathered in drifts. Already, the car was becoming concealed.
Once, or twice, he heard helicopters overhead and, later, a sweep of light aircraft. He sat very still until they had passed over. The day before he had eaten a mushroom, a fungus that looked like an exposed brain, with a long smooth pale stalk pushing its grotesque load above the leaves. Once, when he’d been hunting, he remembered being told by a companion that it was called a brain fungus, and that it was deadly poison. But if it was, all it did was make him vomit.
Running his hands over the stubble on his face, he felt the hollowness of his cheeks, knowing he was getting weaker and light-headed. On each of the three nights he had been in the forest, he had slept in the car, either passed out as on the first night, or slipping in and out of a restless sleep crowded with dreams. First his mother, the daughter of a grocer, who thought that marrying into the professions would be a good thing for her, even though his father was a man of colour. She never learnt French, but otherwise she had tried to live up to his father’s expectations, the good life and the summers by the lake. Oddly, having provided her with all this, he spent the summers reading in remote corners of the house. She’d simply died after a while, as if the effort of pleasing him was too much. When Lou dreamed of his mother, he found himself asking her what to do, how she had got out of it. At what point, he wondered, had she simply been able to stop being alive?
They all filled these dreams then. Owen, so newly and perfectly married. The brothers at the shack by the lake who had been his mates, who had helped him build that first little boat that he had loved. Hugo’s youngest son posted as missing along with the others. His daughter’s sad-looking boyfriend, if that’s what he was. And Evelyn. What of Evelyn? His own flesh and blood.
Evelyn was alive, that was the miracle. The searchers on the shoreline had found her, more dead than alive, washed up at the river’s mouth.
He had gone to the hospital the second day after she had been found, parking close to the hospital door, so that he could slip in without drawing attention to himself. She was in a room on her own at the end of the corridor, in a high bed. As much as he could see her from the doorway, behind the oxygen tubes and ventilators that fed her rasping airways, her face was hard-edged and remote. She had pneumonia, the nurse who met him had said, but he couldn’t go in. She was very sorry but Doctor Adam had left strict instructions that only her mother could visit Evelyn.
And then Freda had arrived, bearing down on him from the opposite end of the corridor. A plump, moist-faced woman, swollen around the eyes, hung onto Freda’s elbow with one hand, stumbling as she walked> In the other hand she held a bunch of flowers.
‘That’s Mrs Finke,’ the nurse said uncomfortably.
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sp; David Finke’s mother. Behind the two women, holding back, stood a man clutching the brim of his hat in both hands, not wanting to go forward with them. It occurred to Lou, then, that the prime purpose of Mrs Finke’s trip from Hamilton was not to visit his daughter, but to retrieve the body of her son. And that this would be David’s father.
Freda looked at him with narrowed eyes.
‘Murderer,’ she said. That was all. The two women entered the sickroom and the door was closed behind them. The man stood in the corridor, snot oozing over his upper lip, not wanting to raise his arm and wipe it away while he was being watched. Lou had turned away. The funerals would start happening soon, already that of Hester Hagley’s husband had been announced in the paper. Strange how he thought of her by her maiden name already. As if she had never been married. And then, he supposed, his friends Harry and Sam and Joe would find the body of their brother, and it would be his turn too. As he left the hospital, Lou had tried not to break into a run.
That was all. He thought, with bitterness, that if she could have just waited another day to make her scene, Evelyn would have been gone, and everyone would have been saved. It was Freda’s fault.
No it wasn’t. It was his.
The girl, Belle. The beautiful girl.
And Violet, the woman with blue hair whom he’d known since he was a boy.
Violet had brought them all together.
Violet had first appeared in his life more than twenty years earlier, although they had only come to know each other since she set up the restaurant. When they met, just once before that, he had something she needed.
The day at the lake house had begun more or less as usual. Since his mother died, there had been fewer holidays. When he and his father did come south, the rooms felt cold and damp even in summer. Mildew touched the linings of the curtains, and there was no food in the cupboards, only baskets of bread and fruit that been prepared by the housekeeper in Auckland, and carried with them in the back of the car. Lou’s memories of that time were of always going to bed hungry the first night, and of feeling as if he was lying between two sheets of ice when he climbed into bed. In the morning, he would bring in firewood, watched by his tiny father, almost hidden behind the timber. On these trips to the south, the lawyer wore a peaked cap and tweedy clothes, with shoes bought in London, a pipe clenched between his purplish lips. When a fire was laid, his father would take up a book and sit in silence, just as he had done when Lou’s mother was alive.
That was a signal for Lou to leave if he wished, and entertain himself for the day. A little further round the bay, near enough to be neighbours, his friends Harry and Sam lived with their family. They were about his age. Sometimes he helped in their garden, and sometimes they went fishing or hunting in the bush. They were growing into rugged men, self-sufficient and, it seemed to Lou, wise in their ways. At a given time, he would reappear and his father would nod, as if satisfied.
But that morning when he first met Violet was different.
Lou was seventeen and about to leave school. If he had been anyone but his father’s son, he would have left Auckland Grammar by then, because he appeared unable to apply himself to study. He didn’t see the point. The lawyer would countenance nothing less than him following in his footsteps, but that was not what Lou wanted. Of course he could have left. He smoked cigarettes and had made love to several girls, and getting a job would have been easy. But the call-up hung over his head and nobody knew when the war would end, so he stayed on, marking time until he was eighteen, waiting to see what would happen next. He went less often to the house by the lake, choosing to stay alone in Auckland while the judge went south. But this time his father had prevailed on him to come, and straight away he saw that something had changed. A local woman had opened up the house. A fire was already set, a meal prepared. Soon after, the doorbell by the stained-glass door rang and, when his father opened the door, a blonde-haired woman was standing there. She was at least half a head taller than his father.
‘Oh mon ami, j’ai arrivé,’ she cried in execrable schoolgirl French.
‘Enchanté,’ her father said with a gallantry that horrified Lou, it seemed so artificial and absurd.
‘You can tell, can’t you, that I’ve been practising. Oh, you’ll be so proud of me, I promise you.’
‘I’m sure,’ said his father.
‘Est que ce votre …? Is this the boy? Your son. Oh, he’s so handsome, so like you, so dark.’
‘Louis speaks French well,’ her father said, suddenly stiff.
‘How do you do, Louis?’ she said, but he could see she was blushing.
The woman was voluble. She talked rapidly about all sorts of trivia, as if she had a list of topics in her head to work through. About a trip to the races where, it seemed, she had won some money. About books she had read — a travel guide and a collection of speeches by a politician. His father listened approvingly, nodding now and then. Occasionally the woman, whose name was Raewyn, would glance at Lou, her eyes narrowing. She likes my father, the boy thought, but she doesn’t like me.
‘Early to bed, young man,’ his father said. ‘Our guest and I have some talking to do.’ As if he was still a child.
Raewyn had gone in the morning but his father was in no mood for Lou to stay indoors. He had brought some work with him, and piles of judgements lay on the sideboard waiting to be opened. ‘Young men should be able to find things to do. You’ve got friends, haven’t you?’
Lou went down to the shore and contemplated his boat. He considered going over for a visit, but the place was quiet, except for the youngest child playing noisily in the garden. In the distance, he saw the old man, Hugo, hoeing a sparse patch of garden near the lake. It was Hugo who had done the most to help him with the boat, shown him how to measure timber, how to set up a frame and how to use tools. He didn’t know how the old man knew all these things because until then he had spent his life tuning pianos. Perhaps he had simply had a childhood of his own and was willing to share what he knew. But Hugo was deaf and they would stand there shouting at each other, with nothing much to say. Lou had developed a boy’s habit of impatience. In the end, he decided to row to the township.
The broad tree-lined streets had always appealed to him, as did the spa baths and tourists, who made the town more cosmopolitan than the city where he lived. Not that there were many tourists around at that time. The streets were filled, instead, with soldiers on leave; dotted among them were war wounded who were being treated at the local military hospital. He met a one-legged man struggling with crutches and offered him his arm.
‘Would you like a drink, mate?’ the older man asked him.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said.
‘You’d better hop it if the coppers call,’ said the soldier, destroying Lou’s illusion that he looked old enough to be in a public bar.
For an hour or so he drank beer with the soldier.
‘If this war carries on, you’ll soon be on your way. You ready for an adventure?’ the man said.
‘Yeah,’ Lou muttered, looking at the place where the soldier’s leg should have been. ‘I’d better push off.’ He had remembered the boat tied to the jetty, the oars stacked in place.
At the waterfront, he found a woman with a child seated in his boat; she was about to cast off. ‘Stop, that’s my boat,’ he shouted.
The woman looked up at him with intensely blue eyes. ‘You shouldn’t leave things lying around.’ Despite the coolness of her gaze, he thought she was not as bold as she was making out. There was a tremor in her hands, and he saw the way she bit her lower lip. The child, a boy perhaps two years old, looked delicate and afraid, pushing himself into the woman’s side at the sound of raised voices.
‘You can’t do that,’ Lou said, putting his foot on the bow.
‘I’ll pay you,’ she said.
‘I don’t need the money.’
‘Most young men need money.’
Lou thought then, that perhaps he did. He was almost grow
n up and his father gave him a child’s allowance. He had two shillings in his pocket, not enough to have contributed to the drinks he had had in the hotel with the soldier. ‘How much?’
The woman produced a five-pound note. A fortune. ‘I need this boat,’ she said. ‘I can’t get transport and I have to get to the bays today, while it’s still light. This is urgent.’
Lou folded his hand around the money. He realised he was slightly drunk, and it was hard to know what to do for the best. ‘When would you come back?’
‘In a couple of hours.’
‘Tell me which way you’re heading. I don’t want it dumped just anywhere.’
‘Over to the bays.’ Pleading with him now. ‘There’s a market garden over there.’
‘Hugo and Ming’s?’
‘You know them?’
‘Sure,’ he said, shrugging. She was already in the boat and the fiver was in his pocket.
When it got dark and she still hadn’t come back, he thought he should go up town and call the police. Several hours had passed. What would his father say if he found Lou had allowed a woman and child to go out on the lake, and they hadn’t returned? Would he be held responsible? Then, at last, as he stood straining his eyes in the dark, he saw a flare lighting the way, and two boats, like a tiny flotilla, approaching the shore. When they were nearly there, the leading craft peeled away and began to head back across the lake. He could see Harry was rowing the boat, and called out to him, but his friend didn’t hear.
Lou saw then that the woman was alone.
She threw him the rope, pulling herself on to the jetty while he held the boat steady. He turned to speak to her, but she had already disappeared into the night.
Cloud cover had descended and obscured the moon. The whole business had given him the creeps and he found himself not wanting to row back across the water in the dark. At a hotel near the lake, he paid for a room, using the receptionist’s phone to ring his father and say that he would be late. ‘I’ve been delayed by my friends, and now it’s too dark to row home. I’m sorry.’ His father didn’t sound as troubled as he might have expected.